Anchoring Agreement in Comprehension

Most linguistic theories of language offer analysis of agreement describing the rules and constraints involved in the computation and interpretation of this dependency. A good testing ground for theoretical accounts of agreement is mismatching patterns. In this article we focus on a mismatch available in the Spanish agreement system – Unagreement – in which there is a person mismatch in the realization of plural subject-verb agreement. Unagreement seems to challenge both purely syntactic and lexicalist analyses of agreement, as the realization of this pattern cannot be carried out either on a strictly formal basis or by simply postulating a lexically-driven asymmetry. We propose an approach that overcomes the limitations of existing analyses and that is able to successfully account for standard as well as non-standard agreement patterns. 1. The Mechanics of Agreement As language comprehenders, we are constantly and unconsciously absorbed in the process of decoding language and its meaning, linking actors to their respective actions and also to real-world entities. Doing this requires careful unpacking of the linguistic input, in search of grammatical cues that give the reader ⁄hearer fundamental coordinates concerning the participants in discourse: what is their role, their number, and whether they are animate or inanimate, female or masculine. This function is carried out by agreement features, morphological categories that signal the person, number and gender information associated with nouns, pronouns, verbs, articles and adjectives. Feature consistency between these different parts of speech is what gives rise to an agreement relation. The realization of agreement entails displacing person, number and gender information from the controller (e.g. a subject argument) to the target (e.g. a verb) of the relation. Across languages, the amount and the type of controller-to-target information displacement can however vary, as shown in (1) below, where the agreement ‘‘richness’’ of Romance languages contrasts with the ‘‘poverty’’ of the system in English. (1) Ipl.m linguisti3.pl.m. scrivono3.pl articolipl.m interessantim.pl ITALIAN Losm.pllingüı́stas3.pl.m. escriben3.pl artı́culospl.m interesantesm.pl SPANISH Lesm.pl linguistes3.pl.m ecrivent3.pl des articlespl.m interesantspl.m FRENCH Linguists3.pl.ø write3.pl interestingø articlespl.ø. ENGLISH Formalizing the mechanics of agreement essentially amounts to describing the way features are structured and accessed by the system and how agreement information flows along the structure. Most theories of language offer their own account of agreement, describing the rules or constraints involved in the realization and interpretation of this relation. Broadly speaking, two main influential approaches to agreement can be Language and Linguistics Compass 7/1 (2013): 1–21, 10.1111/lnc3.12008 a 2013 The Authors Language and Linguistics Compass a 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd identified: a derivational one, which emphasizes the purely syntactic nature of agreement computation, and the lexicalist analysis proposed by constraint-based theories. A good testing ground for theoretical accounts of agreement is represented by mismatching patterns. In what follows, purely syntactic and lexicalist approaches will be reviewed and tested against a specific grammatical mismatch available in Spanish: Unagreement, an agreement pattern characterized by the presence of a person mismatch between subject and verb (Section 1). An alternative proposal – the Feature Interpretation Procedure – based on behavioral and electrophysiological data will be advanced (Sections 2 and 3) that more suitably accounts for the processing of legal mismatching patterns, and overcomes the limits of both the purely syntactic and the lexicalist approaches. 1.1. AGREEMENT: THE SYNTACTIC VIEW Early derivational grammars defined agreement as an asymmetric relation in which the controller is the element from which grammatical information originates and the target the element that inherits such information. This controller-target asymmetry is a key aspect of feature-copying models of agreement such as that developed within the recent Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001). Central to this approach is the assumption that features are expressed as a bundle on a single position in the syntactic tree (Tense, or T), and are uniformly dealt with by Agree, the operation that is responsible for checking and copying feature values from the controller to the target (see Figure 1). Chomsky (1995:308 ff) asserts that feature-type matching is a pre-requisite for the performance of Agree, and thus a mismatch would impede the copying of feature values from controller to target and therefore the correct realization of the dependency. The controller-to-target directionality of the copying is determined by the asymmetry in feature values existing between the specifications on the controller and those on the target: while controllers enter the process already endowed with feature values (e.g. 1st, 2nd or 3rd for person; singular or plural for number), targets do not, hence the need for the copying operation (see Figure 1). This asymmetry has interpretive consequences: not only is the controller the source from which the copying process originates, it is also the element that carries visible or interpretable information to the conceptual system responsible for assigning an interpretation to the dependency in a subsequent computational step. Conversely, agreement information is not interpretable on the target, which inherits the controllers’ information to fill its ‘‘empty’’ person and number specifications. Agree operates within narrowly syntactic boundaries, as unvalued features need to receive a value before the syntactic representation is passed on for subsequent semanticpragmatic analysis. This means that the computation of agreement relations takes place during the syntactic build-up of the sentence, independently of the thematic and semantic-pragmatic information of the arguments involved. This approach is derivational in the sense that the creation (or derivation) of a wellformed linguistic expression goes through specific steps in which operations like Agree are applied. Crucially, purely syntactic computational steps precede semantic-pragmatic analysis. 1.1.1. Why a Purely Syntactic Analysis Cannot Work: Unagreement There are exceptions to the systematic covariance characterizing agreement realization. Across languages, patterns are found in which controller and target do not systematically co-vary, but the well-formedness and the acceptability of the sentence are, however, 2 Simona Mancini et al. a 2013 The Authors Language and Linguistics Compass 7/1 (2013): 1–21, 10.1111/lnc3.12008 Language and Linguistics Compass a 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd preserved. As an example, take the British English pattern in (2b), compared to (2a), probably one of the most frequently used examples of agreement mismatch. (2) a. The faculty3.sg is3.sg meeting tomorrow b. The faculty3.sg are3.pl meeting tomorrow The 3rd person singular subject faculty can be followed by a 3rd person plural verb, and any British English speaker would find this combination perfectly grammatical. Like other collective nouns, faculty is formally singular but its referent can be identified in a plurality of individuals: as such, it can trigger semantic agreement on the verb, as opposed to the purely syntactic agreement of (2a). The Spanish agreement system presents an interesting mismatch that targets the realization of subject-verb agreement and on which we will rest our proposal. Beside standard patterns like the one in (3) below, a person mismatch between a plural subject and verb is allowed: example (4) below illustrates what is known as Unagreement (Hurtado 1985; Jaeggli 1986, among others). Here, the presence of a person mismatch between a 3rd person plural subject and a 1st person plural verb does not prevent the sentence from being grammatical, as opposed to the outright ungrammaticality of (5). In (4), grammaticality is ensured by superimposing the verbal person value onto the nominal one, thus shifting the interpretation of the subject from a 3rd person plural to a 1st person plural one. (3) a. Los turistas3.pl visitaron3.pl un castillo muy bonito b. The tourists visited a very nice castle (4) a. Los turistas3.pl visitamos1.pl un castillo muy bonito b. We tourists visited a very nice castle (5) a. *El turista3.sg visitaste2.sg un castillo muy bonito b. *The tourist (you)visited a very nice castle Agree TP